RPG Combat: Sport or War?

There are two different extremes in arranging fights. One is like war and the other is like a sporting event. Sporting events are supposed to be fair contests between roughly equal forces. On the other hand, war is the epitome of unfair competition.

View attachment 89692​

Jeffro Johnson introduced me to this topic, which was discussed in an ENWorld forum. If your game doesn't involve much combat this discussion may not mean a lot to you.

Strategem: a plan or scheme, especially one used to outwit an opponent or achieve an end

Any GAME implies fairness, equality of opportunity. Knightly jousting tournaments were combat as sport. We don't have semi-pro soccer teams playing in the Premier League, we don't have college basketball teams playing the NBA, because it would be boringly one-sided. People want to see a contest where it appears that both sides can win. And occasionally the weaker side, the underdog if there is one, wins even when they're not supposed to.

An obvious problem with combat as sport, with a fair fight, is that a significant part of the time your players will lose the fight. Unless they're really adept at recognizing when they're losing, and at fleeing the scene, this means somebody will get dead. Frequent death is going to be a tough hurdle in most campaigns.

The objective in war is to get such an overwhelming advantage that the other side surrenders rather than fight, and if they choose not to surrender then a "boring" one-sided massacre is OK. Stratagems are favored in war, not frowned upon. Trickery (e.g. with the inflation of the football) is frowned upon in sports in general, it's not fair, it's cheating.

Yet "All's fair in love and war." Read Glen Cook's fantasy Black Company series or think about mercenaries in general, they don't want a fair fight. They don't want to risk their lives. They want a surrender or massacre. The Black Company was great at using stratagems. I think of D&D adventurers as much like the Black Company, finding ways to win without giving the other side much chance.

When my wife used to GM first edition D&D, she'd get frustrated if we came up with good stratagems and strategies and wiped out the opposition without too much trouble. She felt she wasn't "holding up the side." She didn't understand that it's not supposed to be fair to the bad guys.

Think also that RPG adventures are much like adventure novels: we have to arrange that the players succeed despite the odds, much as the protagonists in a typical novel. In the novel the good guys are often fabulously lucky; in RPGs we can arrange that the players encounter opposition that should not be a big threat if the players treat combat as war rather than as a sport.

I'm not saying you need to stack the game in favor of the players, I'm saying that if the players do well at whatever they're supposed to do - presumably, in combat, out-thinking the other side -then they should succeed, and perhaps succeed easily. Just like Cook's Black Company.

contributed by Lewis Pulsipher
Photo © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5

 

[Aenghus]

People have different tastes with respect to the Sport/War continuum. There are two problems with this continuum though. Firstly, Combat as War sounds more macho, which is a problem, as that's not really true, because of the second point. Which is the DM can always win if they want to. The only way the players can "win" is if the DM permits it. Whether they do so by designing winnable encounters themselves or allowing the players to reframe the enounter to something winnable, the objective is to give the players a fighting chance to win.

Players tastes vary a lot with respect to recon, planning, stealth, tricks and thinking outside the box. A bunch of players have fun just charging in and see all the above as timewasting nonsense.

And as at least one other person has commented, Combat as Sport involves designed encounters. But "fair" is a loaded term, fair for who? A totally even encounter would be a 50% chance of losing or having to run away. But that's sheer insanity for a combat heavy campaign. TPKs would be inevitable in short order. Actual designed encounters are designed to be winnable by the players most of the time. This allows players who want to to use a style closer to "kick in the door" than "ninja squad" and still obtain success.

The only encounters set up to be fair and even I have seen regularly is in Player vs Player combat arenas. These tend to become explorations of the prejudices of the referees in a search for a broken winning combination.

Obviously, some people like board games set up to be relatively fair and even and like the constraints of the rules. Others feel over constrained by them and might test the rules to breaking point, or attempt exploring the notional gamespace beyond the rules.

Combat as War can devolve into "if you can convince the DM you win you win, otherwise your PC loses" paradigm, which sucks for players who hate the "convince the DM" subgame.

 

[Alzrius]

An obvious problem with combat as sport, with a fair fight, is that a significant part of the time your players will lose the fight.

This seems like it should be true, on its face, but there's something that needs to be kept in mind: D&D (at least in Third Edition and onward) decouples "fair" from "level-appropriate." The result is that an appropriate challenge is one wherein the PCs are heavily favored to win, which isn't exactly "fair" per se. That's why a typical party that's facing a monster with a Challenge Rating equal to their level will find it "to be a worthy challenge, but not a deadly one."

 

[thzero]

I'm sorry, but I' can't get past this picture. As someone who's been in fencing before, I can't help but comment about how their posture is TERRIBLE. Bending a sword upside down that way iwll snap it if abused, and the tip went under the mask, dangerous and a penalty. Don't straighten your legs like that!

Yesh. My teacher would kill these two for the way they're fighting.

Based on the moment in time the picture was taken of its apparent that the fencer on the left has attempted to avoid the touch of the fencer on the right which explains his body position. As for the 'under the mask', it looks much more like the tip hit the armpit. And as for bending a foil upside down; that I'm willing to bet wasn't intentional rather it is physics based on the direction of forces in relation to where the tip found purchase on the jackets. A foil is a square flexible blade and can bend pretty in any direction.

 

[cmad1977]

I run it as more of a spwart. Because this isn't an either or thing.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Mephista]

Based on the moment in time the picture was taken of its apparent that the fencer on the left has attempted to avoid the touch of the fencer on the right which explains his body position. As for the 'under the mask', it looks much more like the tip hit the armpit. And as for bending a foil upside down; that I'm willing to bet wasn't intentional rather it is physics based on the direction of forces in relation to where the tip found purchase on the jackets. A foil is a square flexible blade and can bend pretty in any direction.

That's an epee, not a foil. The guard is much too large for that; as well, the lack of mesh jackets for the electronic scoring are a give away. In either case, the blades are designed to bend in a single direction, so as to not break them or the wire; the blade bending the wrong way like that should have broken the wire inside at minimum, the whole blade itself at maximum.

Its possible the guy on the right is attempting a Flash, but the bend is still rather extreme, and if you're getting hit by your opponent like that, it was very badly executed.

 

[Sunseeker]

Note that I'm only speaking to D&D here. I'm not familiar enough with the specifics of other systems to comment on them.
Exactly, and that's why combat as war is good: as a player you know the DM is not going to pull punches and really will use whatever reasonable-for-the-monster tactics she can to try and finish you off, knowing you're not likely to show her monsters any mercy either. The players do have to trust the DM to stay within the rules - but it's a very poor DM who wouldn't.

Adversarial DMing on the battlefield is a good thing.

I guess I can agree with that, provided the human beings at the table all keep it clean.

Personally, I prefer combat as sport. I provide tough, but fair fights.

A pretty decent argument can be made that D&D has slowly gone this direction over the editions. Basic was rough. 1e was rough. 2e backed off a bit. 3e couldn't make up its mind - rough in some ways, not in others. 4e backed off quite a lot and 5e has followed suit.

Maybe. The idea that the base game is "safe" is a pretty reasonable approach in gaming to garner interest from people new to the hobby. I still find the sentiments of the author odd given he's written several editorials about how he dislikes how things have become soft. I mean, what's the point of things being hard if you're plot-protected?

It sounds odd when you put it like that, but isn't that exactly what the whole combat side of the game is in theory balanced around at the design level - the PCs winning (very nearly) all the fights?

See now we're talking about something we can talk about. Is the game designed to make the players win? That's a pretty clear-cut answer: YES.
I personally like to keep things in the Party vs Monsters range of 60/40 or 40/60. I like the idea that victory (not necessarily death) is really never a guarantee. If it is, I won't roll the dice, there's no point, and frankly it's a little depressing.

"Run away" was once a very viable and frequently-used option in a combat. Not seen so often any more as players have - rightly or wrongly - come to expect via the expressed design of the game's last few editions that most encounters will be more or less balanced such that even with poor dice luck the PCs will win...and this shows that D&D combat has by design moved toward sport.

I don't like it, but I can't deny it.

I don't know if that means the game has moved more towards combat as a sport, I think it just means it's moved towards the designers putting extra odds in favor of the PCs to start with. They cast "Protection from Noobs" on the later editions. 4E definitely favored combat as a sport (in their encounter balancing design). The CR system from 3.X and now 5E sort of lets you do your own thing.

I'll be honest, I don't think I've ever played with total noobs. I'm curious if the default difficulties outlined in 5E are actually fitting for newcomers.

 

[Derren]

D&D has been more of a sports game since 3E with 4E being the high point.
What people often confuse is that the sport/war difference has nothing to do with deadliness but the amount of preparation you could do to trivialize encounters.

While 3E started the descent into sport combat by trying to balance all classes instead of having classes which, while not non combatants, were a lot weaker in direct combat than others like it was in 2E there were still ways to either bypass encounters or trivialize them with things like prebuffing and teleport bombs.

4E actively tried to prevent any form of outside influence on combat and to make sure that both sides start without any advantage.

Some people like combat as sport but I loath it as in my opinion it punishes clever players and prevents creativity. It also forces some constraints on the system design I do not like, for example that all PCs have to be balanced in combat as otherwise you would have a hard time creating fair fights.
And lastly combat as sport breaks versimilitude as no one in his right mind would approach combat that way.

 

[Aenghus]

"Creativity" is very subjective. People are entitled to their own tastes, and IMO it's important to be fair and objective in evaluating them if you want to talk about them. Cleverness applied to rules mechanics isn't inferior to cleverness applied outside the box, just different and appealing to different people.

In games people use tactics and strategies that work given the other people involved, and that fit within their comfort zone.

I don't see Combat as War as smarter, or cleverer or more creative, I see it purely as a matter of taste. This helps avoid insulting people with different views.

 

[Derren]

"Creativity" is very subjective. People are entitled to their own tastes, and IMO it's important to be fair and objective in evaluating them if you want to talk about them. Cleverness applied to rules mechanics isn't inferior to cleverness applied outside the box, just different and appealing to different people.

In games people use tactics and strategies that work given the other people involved, and that fit within their comfort zone.

I don't see Combat as War as smarter, or cleverer or more creative, I see it purely as a matter of taste. This helps avoid insulting people with different views.

Combat as war does not take anything away compared to combat as sport. You still can do all the tactical maneuvering you can do with combat as sport. But in addition you have vastly expanded strategic options which combat as sport lack in order to ensure a fair (as much as RPG combats are fair as the PCs are supposed to win) competition.

So in the end combat as war allows for much more creativity than combat as sport, simply because there are more options on the table which are not only limited to what happens during the combat.

 

[Aenghus]

Combat as war does not take anything away compared to combat as sport. You still can do all the tactical maneuvering you can do with combat as sport. But in addition you have vastly expanded strategic options which combat as sport lack in order to ensure a fair (as much as RPG combats are fair as the PCs are supposed to win) competition.

So in the end combat as war allows for much more creativity than combat as sport, simply because there are more options on the table which are not only limited to what happens during the combat.

IMO it's important to realise that people apply their creativity in different ways, and it really isn't the case that one matter of taste is strictly and objectively superior. You are entitled to your opinions as is everyone else, but Onetruewayism is the death of the hobby. Recognise diversity.